Multiple sites linked together to increase link popularity. Also referred to as “interlinking”.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets. They are used to manipulate and easily manage the design and formatting of a website.

Directory

Websites that list other websites, organized into various categories. Human editors assess each website and if approved, they place them into the specific category in the directory. Click here for a list of the major directories.

Description

This term typically has two uses in search engine positioning:

it can refer to the description meta tag which is a line of code in the header of your page used to describe what that page is about, or

it can refer to a description of your site which you would submit to a webmaster you were interested in exchanging links with that they would put below your link on their resources page or directory.

Doorway Pages

A page on your site not there to provide information but rather solely to rank for a specific keyword phrase in hopes that the visitor will go to one of your more useful pages after that. Sometimes used in conjunction with redirects and/or cloaking. You can find more information on this with the Black-Hat SEO Tactics.

Gateway Pages

Another term for “doorway pages”.

Google Bot or Googlebot

Google’s search engine spider

Head

Code that exists on your web page yet is essentially invisible to the visitor. This code includes the title, keyword meta tag, description meta tag, the robots tag and can also contain scripting and other additional information.

Hidden Text

Text which is invisible to the human eye because it is set to the same color as the background. You can find more information on this with the Black-Hat SEO Tactics

Header

There are traditionally 6 header tags ranging from <H1> to <H6>. These tags are typically used to separate a web page into logical parts, acting as titles for various page sections. It is commonly believed that header content is assigned a higher weight than standard content as it generally appears more prominently on the page.

Inbound Link

Another term for “back links”.

Keywords

Words used to identify the theme of your website.

Keyword Density

The percentage of a given keyword or phrase. ex: 1 instances of a keyword in 100 words of page text, equals a 1% keyword density.

Keyword Stuffing

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding unnecessary keywords to a web page to lead search engines to consider the page to be more relevant. You can find more information on this in the Black-Hat SEO Tactics.

Link Popularity

Another term for “back links”.

Meta Tags

HTML used in the source code to provide content and site information to search engine spiders.

Mirror

A mirror is a nearly identical duplicate website (or page). You can find more information on this under “duplicate sites” on our Black-Hat SEO Tactics page

Offsite Optimization

The method of increasing a web site’s rankings by influencing its relationships with other website, primarily links found on other web sites to the target web site.

Optimization

Fine tuning a website or web page with the ultimate goal being to achieve higher rankings.

Outbound Link

Linking from your website to another website.

PageRank

Google’s tool for measuring the importance of web pages.

PPC

Pay-Per-Click. Search engines that operate by charging website per-click to appear higher in the rankings.

PR

Another term for “PageRank”.

Reciprocal Links

Two sites exchanging links by placing a link to each other on each site.

Redirects

A spam tactic used to send a visitor to a different page than the one found in the search results.

Robot

A name given to a spider/bot/crawler program that travels the web collecting data from websites.

Search Engine Optimization

The practice of manipulating web pages and external factors such as linking in order to rank a website higher on the search engines. Also known as: SEO, search engine positioning, search engine placement, search engine marketing, search engine ranking and search engine promotion.

Search Engine Rankings Report

A report that measures a web page or websites search engine rankings for a range of keyword phrases across the major search engines. For this aspect of the process we use a great program called WebPosition Gold.

SERP

An acronym for “search engine results page”.

Search Engine Submission

The registering of your website to the search engines.

Spider

A program that visits and collects specific information from a web page, including the URL and indexing the keywords and text of each page it finds.

Splash Page

Another term for “doorway page”.

Title Tag

Content that exists in the meta data of your page. This content often appears as the clickable title in the search engine results and will appear in your browser’s navigation bar.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator. The address where your website can be found. e.g. www.beanstalk-inc.com. Also knows as a “domain”.